Luca Lagerstrom - A Short Story

Sirens: A Short Glimpse at an Unraveling

There was a strange pervading sensation of anxiety that bothered the residents of a street in the small Croatian town Vukovar. The street, called Ulica Sjecanja, or the “Street of Memories,” was a small cobblestone road lined with nine houses ending at a railway track running perpendicular to the road. The street had a few long-standing homes, all built by old Zdravko, whose house in Vinkovci had been lost to a fire twenty years prior. The other homes along the road could be accredited to newcomers, most of whom had moved from their barren villages to establish blue-collar businesses, mostly in the fields of hardware, equipment, and agriculture. The academics and intellectuals found their hub in the cities, Zagreb particularly. Here, a few families carried their generations down the line of Name and Discipline.  

The winter carried a slow mist over the flat landscape, and night carried the day. Peculiarly, nature’s agitation presented a bizarre phenomenon that had demanded one’s attention. Occurring sporadically across a three-week-or-so time span, a number of residents reported feeling a mysterious, low-frequency pulse in the air, lasting a few minutes, before an overwhelming sound of a weeping siren consumed the atmosphere for up to thirty seconds. No-one said the word, and at times those concerned with the sound would observe their surroundings to discover only indifference. In one case, Zdravko – upon exiting a store where he had just bought some basic supplies – was attacked by the wailing of the siren, a sound of such urgency as a pig’s screaming. Zdravko stood in place, grasping his ear pleadingly, and looked around to find two other people doing the same. All other people in the square where he stood went about their business as usual, offering brief looks of pity or suspicion. 

It was only when old Zdravko had beckoned with his neighbour one morning:

“I am unsure of why I hear the sound of death but do not see it.”

The neighbour frowned, “Are you expecting your time is near?”

Zdravko looked confused, “I’m not talking about myself. Have you not heard the recent buzzing in the air, or that awful siren?”

“A siren?” The neighbour looked concerned. Should he know something?

Zdravko nodded to him, but the neighbour’s eyebrows stayed constricted.

“I have heard no such thing.”

“Yesterday, when I was out in the square, a distant siren swelled to urgency within a matter of seconds, but only a select few other people seemed to notice. Everyone else seemed indifferent or confused at our reactions.”

A visiting doctor had told Zdravko upon request of clarity that there was no clear explanation for this phenomenon. 

“Others have confirmed to you their experience, but then others had no such experience.”

“Yes, doctor.”

The doctor glanced nervously at a notebook. “I have not come across a case like this in my work. The most plausible explanation is an amygdala hijack. An overbearing feeling of anxiety which triggers the human fight-or-flight response to something perceived as a threat. What that threat is, I am not sure. Why some feel the exact same, and others feel nothing, I am also unsure. Perhaps, something new is occurring.”

“Something new?”

The doctor shrugged, “I won’t call it a delusion, for there are things I do not know.”

The anxiety inspired by the phenomenon made its victims succumb to a state of nostalgia, where all around them they observed that which they felt was a matter of the past, or will become as such very soon, and attached to this was a feeling of loss. Little Marko had ran home one morning from playing in the woods to tell his mother of what the Romani camper who lived on the other side of the track – an aged and greyed holistic healer – had mysteriously remarked to him: “He said that interests will collide, and so will the anxiety increase, leading the collective to a boiling point. Only few know this is approaching, and that there is little hope. Time will tell.”  

Time had told that a plague was occurring, one that had soon possessed the vast majority of Vukovar’s residents. The sound of the siren and the low, steady pulse in the air persisted for weeks on end, throughout the winter. People became so bothered and concerned about nothing in particular – or at least nothing tangible – that after a while most people would go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. Any communication supplementary to this was almost completely cut off. People shut themselves away and hid from the danger they felt. They would look out their windows and any person in sight would strike fear and distrust in their hearts. It was a painful, gnawing feeling for many. They just wanted life to be normal, steady and guaranteed, but no one could quite figure out what was the matter. It felt, even though no-one could put it into words, that whatever was the matter, once found it would have already been too late. 

This eating anxiety seemed to reach the entire population, and very soon infiltrated and ate away at the institutions. Schools became disheveled and unharmonious; fights broke out constantly between kids from differing backgrounds. Hospitals overflowed. Recession hit, banks suffered and then the people. There was no monetary circulation. People could not leave but could also not bear staying. One morning, resident Mirela who lived at the end of Ulica Sjecanja came out of her house to find a train passing the street. The train was long, composed of several carts. In each cart were rows on rows of men in uniform, stamped with something else, something Mirela had not seen before in her environment. Whatever occurred after that was not met with much resistance; people had driven themselves to psychotic exhaustion and accepted their fate. The siren became realer and realer. Many still insist it was manifested.

This is a story my mother told me when I was five years old, walking along that same railway track, collecting and throwing stones, a long time after the fact. I asked her how they survived. She said: “We hid in the bunker.” All I saw of the bunker under my grandparents’ home on Ulica Sjecanja was a small, dark room in which I would scavenge for old sweets and toys.